Three ways mass poverty has been created, starting with closing off the commons

When we work, or continue working for change from the ground up; when we build or keep on building new ways of living and being with each other where we live; when we construct or keep constructing the future we know is possible with our own hands, rather than hoping distant leaders will build it for us, we find our true power. Finally, when we combine that with the unbending hope that has powered change through the ages, we know our power has meaning. A 400-year-old economic system is dying and another is struggling to be born. Change on this scale is not going to be smooth or easy. We should not be surprised, then, that moments like this — where the establishment is dealt a body blow — become more and more common. We can despair when that blow comes in the form of right-wing extremists, or we can step-up. We are the ones we are looking for, who can and must grasp the opportunities in these crises that are undoubtedly there. So it’s time to come together, taking time to remember the earth. Remember all the successful struggles for justice that came before us, and imagine all those to come. Remember that social movements are growing all over the world and realising the common struggle. Remember life. Then, organise. Find each other and help midwife the inevitable transition that brings forth from the ashes of neoliberal capitalism a system that works for the good of all life on Mother Earth. This is not just activism; this is our responsibility as human beings alive as this all unfolds. This is why we are here.

Three ways mass poverty has been created.

1: CLOSING OFF THE COMMONS

Before the Industrial Revolution took off in England, most of Europe’s population lived as peasant farmers. We tend to imagine that this must have been a pretty miserable existence; after all, it’s hard to get any poorer than a peasant, right?

Well, it’s true that European peasants didn’t have the consumer lifestyles that we take for granted today. But they did have the most important thing they needed to determine their own futures: secure access to land for growing their food. They also had access to “common” land, which was managed collectively for overlapping uses: grazing for livestock, timber for homes, and firewood for heating and cooking. Peasants may not have been rich, but they enjoyed basic rights of “habitation” that were protected by longstanding tradition.

But this security system came under attack in the 17th and 18th centuries. Wealthy merchants and aristocrats began a systematic campaign to privatize the commons and kick the peasants off their land, which they turned into sheep runs for the highly profitable wool industry. This became known as the “enclosure” movement, and historians regard it as the birth of capitalism as we know it today.

Millions of people were forcibly displaced, creating a monumental humanitarian crisis. For the first time in English history, the word “poverty” came into common use to describe the masses of people who literally had no way of surviving. They poured into cities like London and scratched out a living in sprawling slums—fodder for Dickens’s bleakest novels.

The enclosure movement gathered even more steam once it became clear that it offered a secondary benefit: The impoverished refugees provided the cheap labor necessary to fuel the Industrial Revolution, since they had no choice but to accept the slave-like conditions and rock-bottom wages of factory work. Even small children were sent to the factories by families desperate to survive. And the more people who were displaced from the land, the lower the wages went.

The economic historian Karl Polanyi called this period the “great transformation.”

2: OUTSOURCING THE PROBLEM

Okay, maybe early capitalism did produce poverty in England as an initial condition, but surely after this rocky beginning it began to make everyone richer, right?

There is no doubt that ordinary people in England—and in the rest of Europe—have become richer over the past hundred years, and quality of life has improved dramatically. But the humanitarian crisis didn’t just disappear into thin air—it was exported abroad.

Dispossessed by enclosures and suffering miserable conditions in the factories, England’s working class began to riot, and by the 19th century the country was on the brink of outright class war. England’s industrialists realized that, unless they wanted to sacrifice some of their own newfound power, the only way to solve these social tensions was to find new sources of wealth abroad, and new lands and opportunities for the country’s now “surplus” population.

This is what came to be known as colonialism. Land and resources were grabbed across America, India, and Africa at an astonishing pace, and the wealth was funneled back to Europe, where, beginning in the 1940s, it was used to build hospitals and schools and generally improve the lives of the “lower” class. This strategy succeeded in solving many of the social problems at home, but the colonized populations didn’t fare so well.

Land grabs in North America caused the mass dispossession of the continent’s indigenous inhabitants: Tens of millions died of starvation and disease. In Africa, European capitalists found that the only way to get Africans to work on their plantations and mines was to appropriate their land and impose taxes. People who had been working their own farms for thousands of years found themselves compelled for the first time to sell themselves for wages simply in order to survive—just like the pattern in England earlier on.

And then there was India. During the 19th century, British colonizers taxed Indian peasants in order to force them to grow crops for export to England. They also privatized the common forests and water systems that Indians relied on to support themselves during periods of low rainfall. So when a series of droughts hit in 1876, more than 30 million Indians died of famine. But there was plenty of food: Indian grain exports to Britain increased by 300% during this period. Historian Mike Davis argues that the British market system was directly responsible for this “holocaust.”

3: THE “FREE TRADE” PARADOX

We all agree that colonialism was a terrible system, but thankfully it was mostly over by the 1950s. Since then we have all been focused on development and poverty reduction in poor countries. Right?

Well, after the ravages of colonialism were over there was a time when things started getting better for poor countries. During the 1960s and 1970s, poor countries made careful use of trade tariffs and subsidies to build their economies with great effect. Incomes grew quickly and the gap between rich countries and poor countries began to narrow. In fact, some poor countries became almost as wealthy as their Western counterparts.

But these two decades of hope were brought to a crashing end in the 1980s. The World Bank and the IMF began to impose “structural adjustment programs” on developing countries as a basic condition for receiving international finance. These programs forced poor countries to abandon their tariffs and subsidies, and required them to sell off most of their public services and assets to foreign companies.

According to the “free market” theory popular at the time, this was supposed to improve economic growth. But it turned out that exactly the opposite happened. Per capita income growth was slashed from 3.2% per year to 0.7%. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the average GNP shrank by around 10%, and the number of people living in absolute poverty doubled. It’s difficult to overstate the degree of human suffering that these numbers represent.

Similarly, in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement forced Mexico to cut barriers to imports from the U.S. As cheap American corn flooded into Mexico, some 2 million farmers were forced to leave their land. Many had no choice but to seek work in the sweatshops that sprang up along the border.

By 2004, there were 19 million more Mexicans living in poverty than before NAFTA. Today, more than half the population lives below the poverty line, and 25% do not have access to basic food. NAFTA turned out to be like the modern-day equivalent of the enclosure movement in England.

And just in case we think we might, finally, have changed our ways, right now we are seeing a whole new set of trade agreements being put in place that have taken NAFTA as their inspiration, and then supercharged it. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are in negotiation right now, and if passed without major changes they will extend the model across the globe.

When we consider these patterns of poverty creation throughout history, it becomes clear why the story told by many rich governments, philanthropic organizations, and nonprofits, both in how they talk about the problem every day and via grand maneuvers like the SDGs, is so critically limited. Their focus on charity and foreign aid betrays a deeply partial understanding, and offers such simplistic logic that we must wonder whose interests they really have at heart. If we are to have any hope of solving the problem of mass poverty, then we need to rethink the structures and systems that cause it in the first place.

More powerfully, this process of poverty creation—the forceful extraction of commonly managed assets to serve financial elites—is exactly what recent social movements have called attention to. Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the African uprisings, even the anti-austerity stance of new political parties in Spain and Greece, all have one thing in common: The recognition that the only way for a tiny group of people to become obscenely rich is for huge masses of others to be kept chronically poor.

This cold logic of poverty creation tells us what needs to be done. Before obsessing about amounts of foreign aid, or pretending it can solve deep systemic problems, we need to all focus on changing the rules of economic systems to make them more inclusive, more participatory, more focused on creating well-being than simply extracting more aggregate wealth, and more accountable to those billions who are not being served by the current rules. This is how mass poverty truly can be brought to an end.